The Right Side of History: How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great

by Ben Shapiro

So, in the end, the Bible and the Philosopher come to the same conclusion from opposite directions: the Bible commands us to serve God with happiness and identifies that moral purpose with happiness; Aristotle suggests that it is impossible to achieve happiness without virtue, which means acting in accordance with a moral purpose that rational human beings can discern from the nature of the universe—a universe Aristotle traced back to an Unmoved Mover. George Washington puts the synthesis well in his letter to the Protestant Episcopal Church on August 19, 1789: “the consideration that human happiness and moral duty are inseparably connected, will always continue to prompt me to promote the progress of the former, by inculcating the practice of the latter.”11